The Messner Mountain Museum is Actually on a Mountaintop (Photos)

I don’t know how many museums devoted to the endeavor of mountaineering there are, but I imagine that most of them don’t actually require any mountain climbing to visit them. But that isn’t the case with the Messner Mountain Museum from Zaha Hadid Architects, a concrete museum at the top of Mount Kronplatz in South Tyrol, Italy.

The Messner Mountain Museum gets its name from Reinhold Messner, who came up with at least one of the museum’s most distinctive design aspects – each of the museum’s entrances opens onto a different mountain peak nearby. Those peaks, for those interested, are Peitlerkofel Mountain to the southeast, Heiligkreuzkofel to the south, and Ortler and the South Tyrol to the west, seen from a large balcony attached to the outside of the museum.

Even if you don’t feel like doing any mountain climbing to get to a museum about mountain climbing (thank goodness this isn’t how all museums work, Titanic exhibits would be particularly harrowing), you can still check out the Messner Mountain Museum over at the Zaha Hadid site right here.